There are many environments in which multiple tools and disposables are used, including for example operation rooms, aircraft hangars, garages, or the like.
An operation room is a facility in which intrusive operations are performed on patients. Typically, multiple people participate in an operation, for example a surgeon, an assistant surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. The participating personnel members use multiple tools, such as scalpels, forceps, and others, varying according to the surgery being performed.
Intensive efforts are invested in keeping track of all tools and disposables, in order to make sure no tool unintentionally remains inside a patient's body. Therefore careful counting is performed before, during and after the operation.
Counting the tools is a tedious job and requires intensive resources, including mental resources, personnel time and down-time of the operating room. Counting the tools towards the end of an operation also increases the time the patient's body is open with the associated risks.
In addition, counting is not always error-free, and there have been cases in which tools end up being left within the patient's body, causing severe damage or even death.
Another problem relates to the life cycle of tools. For example, the tools used in an operation have to be washed and/or sterilized prior to further usage. Other constraints may relate to maintenance operations required for the tools, for example, a blade may have to be sharpened after every predetermined number of operations in which it is used. In another example, tools that have been used in an operation performed on a patient with a contagious disease may require extra sterilization before further usage, or the like. Making sure that each tool is used and maintained properly also imposes expenses and requires resources, including record keeping, tracking, manual labor and the like.
A computerized system for counting, keeping track of the tools and their maintenance is desirable to enhance dealing with the tools. Such a system needs to uniquely identify each tool. In U.S. Pat. No. 8,193,938 to Halberthal et al dated Jun. 5, 2012 there is disclosed a system and method for keeping track of tools. Identifying tools is performed using a Radio Frequency (RF) identification transducer tag that is attached to the tools.
A tag reader is required to read the tags in a reliable manner. Typically specific shaped containers (or carriers) with built in readers are used for recording placement of tools before and after their use. The containers are equipped with readers having antennas that are tuned to read RFID tags while taking into account the antenna impedance resulting from the design of the container. Tools may be tracked individually or as sets, e.g. the system may verify that a container contains all the tools of a set and keep track of the location of the container.
A set of tools may be placed on a processing rack and inserted into a processing machine, for example a sterilization/washer/disinfection machine. The computerized system needs to be updated with the details of the process and results of the process, so that it may track the life-cycle of the tool. Typically processing machines produce log files recording the performance of a process. However the log file is not associated to a specific tool or set of tools, thus manual updates are required to keep the information related to a specific instance of a tool and/or set of tools up to date.